Shelley Kessler says, “As an email marketer, more is being asked of you today than ever before. On one side, your boss [and/or board] is demanding more in the form of direct revenue contribution. Data from The Relevancy Group’s most recent executive marketer survey highlights that you’re stepping up to that challenge. As the graph below indicates (Figure 1.), nearly one in four executives report that their email channel drives more than twenty-five percent of their overall revenue (astonishingly, this is nearly double the number who reported the same just two years earlier). On the other... [...]

Barry Levine says, “Focus groups, online questionnaires and standard video recordings are so — you know — last century. A new announcement indicates it may be time to add emotional analytics to your metrics. Major media agency MediaCom and emotion measurement firm Realeyes said today that emotional measurement will become a regular part of the agency’s content testing and media planning. Both companies are based in London. The Realeyes technology will now be integrated into MediaCom’s central content hub, so that producers and planners can regularly include emotion analytics in... [...]

Megan Conley says, “When I joined my agency, I had dealt with analytics before, as anyone in marketing and communications has, but I’d never been exposed to such an advanced level. Growing up, my father used to tell me stories of his pilot training in the Air Force where his trainer would wake him up in the middle of the night and ask him to recite checklists. It wouldn’t be beyond my boss to call me up at 3 a.m. to ask me the percentage of organic traffic compared to three months ago — and why it’s up or down. When I learned of the level of analytics knowlegde that I’d need... [...]

Diego Lo Giudice says, “Modern application delivery leaders realize that their primary goal is to deliver value to the business and its customers faster. Most of the modern successful change frameworks, like Agile (in its various instantiations), Lean, and Lean Startup, which inspire developers and development shops, put metrics and measurement at the center of improvement and feedback loops. The objective of controlling and governing projects to meet vaguely estimated efforts but precisely defined budgets as well as unrealistic deadlines is longer on the agenda of leading BT organizations. The... [...]

Ömer Artun and Dominique Levin says, “Propensity models, also called likelihood to buy or response models, are what most people think about with predictive analytics. These models help predict the likelihood of a certain type of customer behavior, like whether a customer that is browsing your website is likely to buy something. This helps marketers optimize anything from email send frequency, to sales staff time, to money, including discounts. For example: Online pet pharmacy PetCareRx has served pet owners for more than 15 years. It sells many products that customers have to reorder at... [...]

Bill Sebald says, “A process can easily become a habit. A habit may not change without awareness or intervention. Before it becomes a habit, a process should be adjusted to change along with new goals, constant learning, experimentation, and so on. Considering your time in analytics, are you engaging in a process, or in an outdated habit? That’s a real question that digital marketing practitioners should ask themselves. Inherently, marketers tend to be buried with work, reusing templates to speed up results. But many agencies lean on those templates a little too much, in my opinion. Templates... [...]

Pratik Dholakiya says, “Actionable metrics are like oxygen for your decision-making. The decisions you make obviously have a direct impact on your business. Google Analytics has been the staple stats feeder for a gazillion marketers and business owners over the years. But does it actually give you all the data you need? In fact, do you even realize the different types and sources of data that are available to you and whether you have uses and applications for all of them? Let’s take a closer look. Real-Time Web Analytics Google Analytics already provides you with real-time analytics built... [...]

Rachel Sprung says, “When it comes time to assess your marketing efforts, it’s not uncommon for you to run into a ton of questions. How are your contacts trending month over month? Was the time you spent creating social media graphics for that campaign worth it? And what about your email marketing efforts? How are those stacking up against your paid initiatives? So many questions, so little time … And while it’s easy to get lost in a mess of reports and numbers when you go looking for answers, it doesn’t have to be that way. To save you some time, we’ve put... [...]

Lori Goldberg says, “In digital advertising, we have an uncommon ability to collect user data that’s superior to other forms of advertising data; particularly compared to what’s available in TV or print. However, merely collecting the data can be overwhelming unless a marketing anthropologist can cut through the clutter and give meaning to what the data says about your business. Here are some tips on how to give meaning to your website traffic or advertising response data. Separate perception from reality Often, a business’ perception of its customer is very different than the customer’s... [...]

Benjamin Filip says, “At MarketingExperiments, we use patented heuristics to evaluate websites, emails and other digital mediums. Often people think that a heuristic evaluation is a purely qualitative approach to a problem. This can be true, but when you combine quantitative analytics with the qualitative knowledge you increase the power to make meaningful change. This post will show relevant metrics for three of these elements that any marketer — from beginner to advanced — can use to discover opportunities for improvement. Step #1. Look at the qualitative elements of your website Often... [...]